


The Shadow of Something Real

by starfleetdicks



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Dreams and Nightmares, Implied Relationships, M/M, Movie Spoilers, Post Star Trek: Into Darkness, Star Trek: Into Darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 13:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfleetdicks/pseuds/starfleetdicks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for Star Trek Into Darkness. </p>
<p>Spock has nightmares. </p>
<p>A character exploration through a Vulcan's more coherent dreamscape and his nightmarish reliving of those fateful minutes by the warp core. Implied relationship between Kirk and Spock, at least on Spock's side of the equation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shadow of Something Real

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dewcake (dewcake)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewcake/gifts).



> "Freud suggested that bad dreams let the brain learn to gain control over emotions resulting from a distressing experience."
> 
> Title inspired by Peter Weir's 1977 Australian film _The Last Wave_.

_“Better get down here. Better hurry.”_

Spock is running and getting nowhere. The seconds fly by and the halls seem too long, snaking left and right and back again. He has to take a turbolift down to the lower decks to reach them. He doesn’t know how he knows but he does. Cold, calculating logic reminds him that he would have done it, gone into the warp core to save the ship. That’s how you know, Spock. _It was only logical,_ Kirk whispers to him behind thick glass. And it’s wrong. Spock should be lying there instead. He knows with the same certainty that he knows constants: the speed of light in a vacuum, Planck’s constant, Bohr radius, atomic mass constant, and... first and second radiation constant.

_“I’m scared, Spock.”_

Spock knows of fear. He has felt it all his life. As a child when bullied, when Sybok left him, when going before the elders, when trying to find a home at Starfleet, when running to save Vulcan, when watching his mother die, his planet die, Pike die, the Enterprise falling out of the sky, and Kirk die.

_“How do you choose not to feel?”_

He does not have the heart to tell him. The control he has over his emotions is so fragile, so insignificant. It was weak as a child, strengthened slowly over time, and frayed. Like an unraveling thread work, his mother’s death pulled a loose string and Spock had watched as his control dissolved into the same nothingness that took his home world. There had been no reclaiming control after such destruction of his barriers. He had fallen back on routine and facades. And when Kirk sits there, looking into Spock’s eyes as if he holds the answers, Spock cannot tell him. So he lies as a Vulcan cannot. He is only feeling in the moment. That Kirk’s death is the second emotion this strange human has wrung from him. 

He does not tell Kirk that he has also wrought anger and affection and annoyance and love and worry and so many other countless things in his heart. 

It hits him only then that Kirk had meant to befriend him from the minute Spock walked back onto the bridge after his emotional outburst and relinquishing of command. Only then does he realize why Kirk violated the prime directive, why he had to save Spock without a question or a moment’s hesitation, why it was so important to Kirk to save the Enterprise and the crew on board, and why finally it had been important to Spock to open the door to the room where Kirk was dying so he could touch him, hold him, save him. 

_“Because you are my friend,”_ he answers truthfully.

It is the crisp memory of Kirk reaching out for him and meeting glass, their shared ta’al, the last startlingly deep look into the cerulean of human eyes as vast as space itself, and the sudden drop of that hand that haunts Spock and will continue to haunt Spock.

And suddenly he is pounding on the glass and begging to be let in and reaching for Kirk but cannot touch him. If only he can save his katra. If only he could touch him. 

_I can save him, I could save him, why won’t you let me save him._

And he curses everything. Uhura for not finding Kirk before he did this stupid, idiotic, heroic thing. Scotty for not calling him down the minute Kirk went in. 

For only saying, _“Better get down here. Better hurry,”_ in so heavy a tone that he knew before he sprung from the captain’s chair exactly the path that was laid before him as if he had walked it himself, some lifetime or world ago.


End file.
